AWS
Rent servers, storage and managed services instead of running your own.
AWS is a collection of managed infrastructure and platform services — compute, storage, databases, networking and more — that you rent and configure through an API, instead of buying and operating the hardware and software yourself.
- Difficulty
- intermediate
- Time
- 12+ hours
- Sections written
- 70
Why it matters
- It removes the operational work of running physical infrastructure — racking servers, patching database engines, replicating storage across buildings.
- The shared responsibility model still leaves configuration, identity and data squarely on you, so using AWS is not the same as being secure by default.
- Almost every other backend topic here — Django, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker — eventually needs to run somewhere, and AWS is the most common answer.
- Reading a service by its pricing dimensions and its quotas, not just its name, is what separates "I used AWS once" from being able to operate on it.
Where it is used
- Hosting web backends and APIs — EC2, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway
- Managed databases and caching — RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
- Object storage and content delivery — S3, CloudFront
- Infrastructure as code and CI/CD — CloudFormation, CDK, CodePipeline
The big picture
- Account — your billing + resource boundary
- leads to IAM (scopes)
- IAM — who can do what
- leads to Networking (authorizes access into)
- Networking — VPC, subnets, routing
- leads to Compute + data (carries traffic to)
- Compute + data — EC2, Lambda, RDS, S3
- leads to Operations (is observed and deployed by)
- Operations — CloudWatch, IaC, CI/CD